There has been a long felt need for an improved system using a recording medium for accumulating data concerning routine transactions to be fed to an electronic computer.
A typical system, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3.401,394, provides as a master source document containing magnetically encoded transaction data, a card containing discrete soft iron slugs molded in an encoded pattern. When magnetic recording tape is placed in contact with the card and a magnet is moved thereover, the flux produced by the magnet is concentrated by the slugs and alters the magnetization in the tape, thereby recording the encoded pattern thereon. The encoded patterns on the recording medium may be subsequently sensed to produce electrical signals for processing in the computer or other data processing equipment. However, such a system requires the card to be encoded at the time of manufacture and does not allow for subsequent insertion of updated information.
Other methods for accumulating encoded data from magnetically encoded sources onto a magnetic recording medium are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,738,383, 3,536,855 and 3,341,854.